The Art of George Condo
by Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky that subliminal kid

"...And we must ask about that continuing silence within postmodernisms shifting terrain, about whether the forms of licensing of the gaze that this proliferation of difference invites and allows, at the same time as it disavows, is not really... a kind of difference that doesn't make a difference of any kind..."

///Stuart Hall O

Writing about George Condo is difficult. To me a lot of his work reflects a kind of cross roads in our culture: wealth and preset ideas of European culture in a surrealist context, a critique of beauty from a viewpoint based on seamless composites of "found models" or portraiture, record covers, music, film, and a host of other contexts that seem to be blurring together these days. De Chirico, Romare Bearden, Rembrandt, E.T.A. Hoffman, Magritte, Jacob Lawrence... the list goes on, but a lot of that territory has been covered and to rehash it again would be boring not to mention tedious...

So I sit back and look out the window and think about painting in a world immersed in electronic media of all sorts, and let my mind drift... rates and dates, nets and bets, masks and tasks, codes and modes... it all just flows....It was a rainy nite, and basically I just got home from touring with the legendary hip-hop M.C. Kool Keith a.k.a. Dr. Octagon, a.k.a. Dr. Doom, a.k.a. Robbie Analog, etc. etc. and as usual, I checked my e-mail. Apart from the usual assortment of messages, correspondences, advertisements and various other things I get in the mail everyday, there was an intriguing series of pronouncements from an anonymous market research group checking in on the internet's communications habits. On-line: It's a strange ecology of minds, but anyway... the e-mail read like this:

Mime-Version: 1.0
X-Sender: meta@null.net (Unverified)
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 23:01:44 -0800
To: meta@null.net
From: /m/e/t/a/ (meta@null.net)
Subject: eden

Virtual humans are waiting in the wings, poised to serve and entertain us,said participants at the Virtual Humans 2 conference, which brought together academia, the military, technologists, and entertainment types to share their progress toward the discipline's Holy Grail - an autonomous,computer-generated individual indistinguishable from a human being.
//
We'll be able to brush up on social and emotional skills, such as disciplining a worker or chatting up a first date, by practicing first on virtual humans. "We can already capture human facial expression, and use that to animate a computer-generated character" said Linda Jacobson, VR evangelist at Silicon Graphics. "But those motions have yet to be simulatedin an autonomous setting."
//
Jacobson predicts the appearance of virtual surrogates within two-and-a-half to three years.
//
Plastic surgery, which was intelligently used in Hollywood history, has become increasingly artificial in style: Women's faces are being pulled too tight and turning generic and characterless, while breasts look more and more like blocks of frozen squash. Visuals have gotten homogenized among not just porn stars but soap opera ingenues and TV newswomen.
//
Advances in computer science would occur more rapidly if it weren't for one thing: people.
//
"People are the single most limiting factor to the progress of computer science" said David Tennerhouse, chief scientist with DARPA in a speech at Mobicom, a mobile technology conference. "We need to get humans out of the computing loop" he said.
//
In a recent survey, CommCore and two other firms that specialize in high-tech communications counseling found that one in five office workers use e-mail as a way to avoid speaking to people in person -- even others in the same office--71 percent of business callers would rather leave a voice mail that talk with the person they are calling.
//
--65 percent would rather send an e-mail than leave a voicemail.
//
Not only does the PlayStation II boast incredible raw graphics power, it also has the power to simulate the physical properties of real world objects, including the behavior of animals and humans.
//
Sony said its new "emotion synthesis" graphics processing system will simulate "not just how the images look, but how the characters and objects in a game think, act, and behave."
//
The Sony PlayStation II system grew a virtual forest in which each leaf was individually rendered. The forest swayed in the digital wind created by calculating the force on each leaf in real-time...

When I finished going through the huge volume of e-mail I get everyday I sent a reply to the sender of this wonderful nugget of information but I never heard back and it didn't matter. The message in the bottle thrown into the ocean of information that crosses my mind every day had struck and its container had shattered. It didn't matter who had sent it because it could have been written by many many many people or no one at all. It could have been a automatic message sent to many people and what do you write to someone who may or may not exist? Anyway, the basic idea was there: information, de-humanization, cultural dispersion, anomie, loss of culturally fixed modes of assessing the consensual reality we inhabit, the notion of a "universal" sense of the "real" being replaced by its subjective interpretations, and so on etc. etc. It's all there. The list goes on, but I think you get the picture: We live in a world where most of our notions of "natural" and "artificial" human nature have been completely revised over the last several centuries, and in fact, it seems to be a process that is deepening and accelerating rather than stopping or slowing down. It's a situation in which art and music - variables that act as reflections of the cultural mores of any given society - have a an immediate primacy when it comes to conveying the sense of transformations that have been occurring in our civilization throughout the "modern" period. Jazz - a music of invocation and quotation, of call and response, fluid transpositions, structured formlessness, cool distraction, methodical refraction... how do you write about it from the viewpoint of painting? How can you make it's secrets unfold and become visual? How can you make it reflect a world where it is already one of the voices of the invisible, a mythos with a dizzying array of messages and viewpoints?cd>dir>ex>dialogic:memetic>

A central theme in our culture of hyper-accelerated Electro-Modernity is a sense of unease, of anxiety - of uncertainty over the human condition because simply put, no one knows where we stand anymore. When you hold up a mirror to an uncertain image what looks back at you? Is it a premonition of how you could be? Is "the real" reflected in a kind of puzzle made exploring the fragments we've made of it, a kind of haiku of the perceptions we've shed as we pursue a dream made of other dreams? It's a difficult question, and an even more difficult answer how to express these fragile involutions of consciousness, but I have a feeling if people are going to be able to deal with the "human" condition in the 21st century, it's an issue that will definitely have to be explored. Throughout this century visuality has been a way of exploring the wide variety of phenomena this "human condition" in the face of rapid cultural change fostered by technological innovation and deep uncertainty in the name of "progress" has produced. Even while the world moves rapidly away from the realm of the obvious, visuality will probably haunt "human" society as it becomes ever more involved with the immersive prosthetic relationships that technology brings into being at an ever increasing rate. Then, of course, we have the psychological side of the equation:
cd:dir:goto:symbol/code/flux...

"for the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody, only notes, a myriad of tiny jolts. They know no rest, an inflexible order gives birth to them and destroys them without even giving them time to recuperate and exist for themselves. They race, they press forward, they strike me a sharp blow in passing and are obliterated. I would like to hold them back, but I know that if I succeeded in stopping one it would remain between my fingers only as a raffish languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even will it. I know of few impressions stronger or more harsh..." Jean Paul Sartre, Nausea

...and so with undo haste as we flee into the next century it sometimes seems like we've never really examined the time we lived through. A backwards glance over our shoulders as we enter the next time zone, a harried and pressed moment of suspension as we become immersed in the artificial world we've built around ourselves, a sly inspection of the materials of perception embedded in the way we think - all of this seems like an exorcism of some sort of phantasmic presence that through an unknown agency had taken possession of the collective mind of the 20th century. Frame the framer, move from cliche to archetype, flick the switch, close the circuit... One of the first artists to inhabit this kind of cultural space wasn't necessarily a painter or even an artist - he was an actor. It doesn't take much to realize that someone like Artaud with his paranoias and deliriums should be the medium for this kind of aesthetic but the psychological realm he inhabited seems to point to a place where almost all human qualities have been intensified and dispersed. Like two mirrors placed in front of one another, Artaud's "art" - self referential while being completely immersed in the flow of the theater that he attempted to construct out of himself - pointed to a place where internal and external reality, subjective and objective interactions with the world at large imploded. Through his writing, artwork, and above the interplay of the two, he attempted to create a place of total media where we are all caught in a turbulent quest for an "outer-consciousness" but seem to have lost the will to find where we started from. But what links Artaud and Condo? Artaud: high modernisms last gasp, the polyphrenic whistle blower who exposed Europe's fascination for the "primitiv" as a kind of psychological escape route from the death of God. Artaud, the actor in a theater of whose psychic apparatus was a flight across fractured modes of thought: what better route to explore the ways of jazz in the late 20th century than through the lens of his eyes?

"There is a mysterious identity of essence between the principle of the theater and that of alchemy" Artaud wrote in a sub-section of his essay "The Theater and Its Double" back in 1938 called "The Theater and Alchemy". For him these notions of a principle of "virtuality" was a response to a world slowly losing focus as the end sequence of the industrial revolution. The consequences of mass culture, to him, created the birth cry of our world of cybernetics and distributed networks of identity, our world of Condo painting: "It is that alchemy and the theater are so to speak are virtual arts, and do not carry their end - or their reality - within themselves....where alchemy, through its symbols, is the spiritual Double of an operation which functions only on the level of real matter, the theater must also be considered as the Double, not of this direct, everyday reality of which it is gradually being reduced to a mere inert replica - as empty as it is sugarcoated - but of another archetypal and dangerous reality, a reality of which the Principles, like dolphins, once they have shown their heads, hurry to dive back into the obscurity of the deep... for this reality is not human but inhuman, and man with his customs and his character counts for very little in it... " Artaud - madman, seer of the industrial age, advocate of the destruction of most principles holding "civilized" society together pronounced in this one essay a statement that preceded the technology that it described by almost 60 years in the same essay: "Before going further, let us consider the curious predilection for the theatrical vocabulary of all books dealing with alchemical subjects, as if their authors had sensed from the beginning all that was representative, i.e. theatrical, in the whole series of symbols by means of which the Great Work is to be realized spiritually, while waiting for it to be realized actually and materially, as well as in the digressions and errors of the ill-informed mind among these operations, in the almost "dialectical" sequence of all the aberrations, phantasms, mirages, and hallucinations which those who attempt to perform these operations by purely human means cannot fail to encounter... "

A list of names that George is painting as name portraits comes to mind when I think of what he's up to for this show. George's signature motif of manikin like figures out of a hypothetical classical past aren't around this time around, he's making a show where Figurative Form becomes Formal Function: fact and fiction - form follows function or something like that. During one conversation we had about the show George discussed the way his modus operandi for this show was coming together: "I wanted to show how record covers had been a kind of secret agent for change in mass culture... they were a kind of vector for abstract art to suddenly get out of the galleries and into mass culture... they slipped in and changed the way people thought about abstract art." For him the situation of art in the late 90's has become a kind of philosophical debate between a couple of variables: Music. Art. Names. Labels. These variables interact in every circumstance where art and music come together. They're coordinate points in a dramatugical grid made of flesh and blood and layers and layers and layers of sound and thought refracted across the surface of the paintings codes. A chorus, perhaps, or a litany: Lester Young Billie Holiday Thelonius Monk Anthony Braxton Jimmy Smith Don Cherry Elvin Jones Gil Evans Eric DolphyBill Evans Wayne Shorter John Lewis Bud Powell Lee Konitz Count Basie ... Even thinking about how we perceive time and space - two of the main variables of alchemy - and how they interact in theater makes one pause: to sort through the vast changes that have been wrought on the planet and the minds inhabiting it in the space of one hundred years is staggering. Music these days is a kind of total theater - it has absorbed almost all aspects of performance and visuality to become a kind of Gesamptkunstwerk people like Wagner or Cocteau could have only dreamed of even 100 years ago, let alone 200 - the only people who were thinking about this kind of stuff were prophets and madmen. Fact and fiction, form and function: all have been taken over by the video, and the process, as I so often like to say, is just beginning. Music videos and music culture inform every aspect of daily life: soundtrack, lifestyle, patterns of dress, modes of being: they all find themselves immersed in the heady flow of sounds that permeate the quotidian reality we find ourselves living at the end of the 20th century. "What characterizes almost every psychopath and part psychopath is that they are trying to create a new nervous system for themselves," Norman Mailer wrote in his classic essay on identity exchange and White American Double Consciousness entitled "The White Negro" back in 1957 (the same year Condo was born) during the hey day of jazz in American and European art and music cultures. "generally we are obliged to act with a nervous system which has been formed from infancy, and which carries in the style of its circuits the very contradictions of our parents and our early milieu. Therefore, we are obliged, most of us, to meet the tempo of the present and the future with reflexes and rhythms which come from the past. It is not only the "dead weight of the institutions of the past" but indeed the inefficient and often antiquated nervous circuits of the past which strangle our potentiality for responding to new possibilities which might be exciting for our individual growth... " It is this link between the languages of Artaud and Condo, black and white, that madness lurks, it's face a blur of all the values that have risen from the friction points of having "fixed" identity in a world of total transformation. I think you might hear an echo of jazz in that. For Condo's generation jazz was a kind of release valve - as it had been for many painters before him. Whether you look at African American painters like Romare Bearden or Jacob Lawrence who sought racial identity in the juxtapositions of jazz music while healing themselves in the process. Their vernacular of collage mirrored the intense changes of jazz - of trying to portray a visual search for a cultural space where they could existin a world that would deny them identity even while it struggled to copy their every movement. From comic to sublime, from Africa to Europe and further on to America, a change was wrought in the minds of everyone in the new world. A change that for one culture would be madness, while for the other would be erasure. In the middle of a conversation Condo mentioned how Aldous Huxley's famous essay "Heaven and Hell" had influenced him, and which was written around the same time as Mailer's essay: "like the earth of a hundred years ago, our mind still has its darkest Africas, its unmapped Borneos and Amazonian basins... like the giraffe and the duck billed platypus, the creatures inhabiting these regions of these remoter regions of the mind are exceedingly improbable. Nevertheless, they exist, they are facts of observation; and as such, they cannot be ignored by anyone who is honestly trying to understand the world in which he lives. " It's amazing how both takes on contemporary society have a resonance with Marshall Mcluhan's infamous dictum: "the 20th century encounter between alphabetic and electronic faces of culture confers on the printed word a crucial role in staying the return to the Africa within. " These quotations I use are a riff on a certain topic - white voyeurism and psychological appropriations of both the visual and verbal world of the African American musician and artist. But it isn't just the will to what W.E.B. Dubois termed "double consciousness" that entranced Europeans when they encountered the culture of African-America: it was the sense of extreme layering, of living as a kind of palimpsest. Mailer would later write in his "White Negro" that "what makes Hip a special language is that it cannot really be taught - if one shares none of the experiences of elation and exhaustion which it is equipped to describe, then it seems merely arch or vulgar or irritating. It is a pictoral language, but pictorial like non-objective art, imbued with a dialectic of small but intense change, a language for the micro-cosm, in this case, man, for it takes the immediate influences of any passing man and magnifies the dynamic of his movements not specifically but abstractly so that he is seen more as a vector in a network of forces than as a static character in a crystallized field. "

Total theater. This is where I find a link between Artaud and Condo. The process of constant change and transformation in the environment that we inhabit shows no signs of slowing down - is it involution or evolution? From a time when people never thought we'd be able to fly, to the footprints we've left on the moon, to the various forms of digital culture that have invaded the human psyche - mind and body - on to the mass media, mass wars, mass culture, and acceleration of the pace of life in a world of sensory overload, one can trace a trajectory of existential thought that highlights a kind of full scale structural revision of the idea of what used to be called "human." Like Artaud said back in 1938 when he coined a word that has haunted the century since: "All true alchemists know that the alchemical symbol is a mirage as the theater is a mirage. And this perpetual allusion to the materials and the principle of the theater found in almost alchemical books should be understood as the expression of an identity (of which alchemists are extremely aware) existing between the world in a way in which characters, objects, images, and in a general way all that constitutes the virtual reality of the theater develops, and the purely fictitious and illusory world in which the symbols of alchemy are involved... " For Artaud theater was a meta space where almost all aspects of human creativity were absorbed and abstracted until there remained nothing that could remotely be called human. Today we live in a world where almost all aspects of human life in the post-industrial world revolve around the interaction of the human and non-human, symbolically we move as Phillip K. Dick said a long time ago as a reflection of the Biblical phrase ("and now we see the world as through a glass darkly...") "through a scanner darkly," and the word "virtual reality" takes on a powerful resonance. For artists like Condo and Artaud, we've moved on and taken over another zone, and anything else is, as they used to say, "old news." Like a house with no tenants, or a book put down in haste but faintly remembered, we look back at the mirage that was the 20th century and feel a faint sense of what could have been - and the permutations of that place of possibility is what haunts us today.

Like a living dream or a camera floating through some new non-linear film with no narrative and certainly no director and no author, we've been taken from a place in language where once people would have used the word "madness" to describe the kind of psychology inhabiting the cultural terrain of the late 20th century to a new kind of normative engagement with the "everyday" and created a meta space between how we live and what we live. The dichotomy between the two is a relatively new place and, as always, art is the guide to the ways we explore the psychological terrains of our interior minds. Everything else - music, science, architecture etc etc - follows the paths art carves out of the perceptual routes that make up the textual surface of that linguistic mesh of words and ideas in the concept of the term "human." A dream within a dream, many minds within one mind: that is the modus operandi of the late 20th century. To be an artist in this day and age is to look at the birth of different ways of thinking and being, and I think that this is what Condo is trying to tell us. Another quotation enters the field and moves across the surface of the text:"There is no madness except as the final instant of the work of art - the work of art endlessly drives madness to its limits; where there is a work of art, there is no madness; and yet madness is contemporary with the work of art, since it inaugurates the time of its truth. The moment when, together, the work of art and madness are born and fulfilled is the beginning time when the world finds itself arraigned by the work of art and responsible before it for what it is. " To me, there's been a hidden logic throughout most of the century, a kind of secret dialog between music and theater, and one of the most vigorous descriptions of a life of the mind in this hypertextual world we live in wasn't a scientist or even really an actor or musician: "it" was the phenomenon we know of as Antonin Artaud. It wasn't long ago by the standards of geologic time but since he walked around screaming scatological phrases and conjectures, a lot has changed. Back in 1938 when he wrote his classic series of essays "The Theater and It's Double" the world was a seething cauldron of intrigue as nation states vied for control of the "civilized world" and access to the resources - and people - of the non European world. It's seeing how this fractured terrain of the colonial and the post colonial facets of "mass culture" affected the development of the world condition as we know it today that Artaud's writing really makes one realize the existential conditions of a Europe with no divinity. How does a culture live when it's God has died? For both Nietzsche and Artaud, two mediums for the death cry of the abstraction that was once known as God, the end result was madness. For the rest of the world, it has been a slow absorption into the realm of technology and a gradual phasing out of all almost all "old" conventions. We live in that present moment where the echo of the death cry of a God most of the human species never knew lingers like a phantasm drifting across our field of vision blurring the lines between self and other, European and non-European, human and non-human, life and death. "The poet's mind, and at a few decisive moments the mind of the scientist, works according to a process of association of images " Italo Calvino wrote in his essay "Visibility:" "...that is the quickest is the quickest possible way to link and to choose between infinite forms of the possible and the impossible. The imagination is a kind of electric machine that takes account of all possible combinations and chooses the ones appropriate to a particular purpose... "

In a world conditioned by the constant intervention of non-human aspects of "culture" (can something non-human be cultural?) symbols of every type proliferate at an almost exponential rate these days, and so too does our ability to be enmeshed and caught in their multiplying intrigue. In an interview in a 1969 edition of Playboy, Marshall Mcluhan (perhaps the first theorist to make sense of what Artaud was talking about even though he does seem to be out of vogue these days, but hey, who's counting?) had an interview in which basically he describes the role of art in this kind of context: "until the present era, this awareness has always been reflected first by the artist, who has had the power - and courage - of the seer to read the language of the outer world and relate it to the inner.... because inherent in the artist's creative inspiration creative inspiration is the process of sniffing out environmental change. It's always been the artist who recognizes that the future is the present, and uses his work to prepare for it...the content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the case of an atomic bomb. But the ability to perceive media induced extensions of man, once the province of the artist, is now being expanded as the new environment of electric information makes possible a new degree of perception and critical awareness by non-artists " It's this cross roads at the edge of the conventional that Condo paints from.

cd:dir>>Jazz>goto>abstrakt/refract

A long time ago in something that seems like another world at this point, W.E.B. Dubois's famous statement that the major "problem of the 20th century will be the color line." Since his famous statement we've had a culture in total flux. Since the arrival of the first slaves on Hispanola back in the 16th century on up to the current moment, there has always been a refraction of identity in the Americas. It's been a kind of mixing lab for all cultures of the world to pass through, and the continuous evolution of world culture it seems, has passed through most of its radically new phases by filtering them through the lens of the New World. I always think of this when I think about how jazz was viewed as being almost "structureless." Jazz has been up until the hip-hop moment, the musical export of America in the 20th century. A lot of people consider it to be the first real American music. Have you ever watched a group of jazz musicians play? First you have to watch the people, and then you hear the music. Because if you do it the other way, it'll almost feel like the people were never there. The music took them away and spoke of their absence in its presence. That's how intense it is. Improvisations, calls and responses, continuous vertiginous movement and change - that's what almost any style of jazz evokes. But I'm fascinated with how it reflects the mood of American life in the city, the ebb and flow of a people caught in the midst of a kind of cultural warp caught between times and places and worlds. Jazz - each thing you hear here determines the direction that you move toward. You just follow the music, and if you follow it, it can take you anywhere. Street corners, tales of phantasms at the edge of the known world around the corner, over the horizon, beamed back through a satellite dish: think now in the moment, and then it was gone (again). Underground in the space of the mind's eye, look back. Look through... Jazz. Sometimes I think of how it must have been in Congo Square in New Orleans when the different marching bands flowed through. The sense of intense racial classification and modes of conduct based on class and hierarchy, styles of presentation - dress codes... all of this flows through my mind. The late 20th century has seen a blurring of all the things that were once fixed in stone and jazz was the soundtrack to the dissolution:

"Think how it is, if you can manage, just manage it. Nature freaks for you, then. Turns itself into shelter, byways. Pillows for two. Spreads the limbs of lilac bushes low enough to hide you. And the City, in its own way, gets down for you, cooperates, smoothing its sidewalks, correcting its curbstones, offering you melons and green apples on the corner. Racks of yellow headscarves; strings of Egyptian beads. Kansas fried chicken and something with raisins call attention to an open window where aroma seems to lurk. And if that's not enough, doors to speakeasies stand ajar and in that cool dark place a clarient coughs and clears its throat waiting for the woman to decide on the key. She makes up her mind and as you pass informs your back that she's daddy's little angel child. The City is smart at this: smelling and good and looking raunchy; sending secret messages disguised as public signs: this way, open here, danger to let colored only single men on sale woman wanted private room stop dog on premises absolutely no money down fresh chicken free delivery fast. And good at opening locks, dimming stairways. Covering your moans with its own..." Toni Morrison,

Jazz Today. Yesterday. Tomorrow... A world looms on the horizon to show us a place in our minds where the natural has been displaced by our perceptions of it - indeed, the two have become a blur in the accelerated psychological landscape of a culture that has been completely engulfed by its means of communications. Distance collapses, emotions come to us through t.v. commercials that appeal to our sense of dispersed identity. Time freezes, only to be sold back to us in the form of watches and operator assisted inquiries.

A theater of archaic figures comic in their ability to invoke records & songs: advances along the line... All this is mixed in a flood of meaning, a haiku of temporal detritus, sing song, flow gone: it rhymes afterall. The jazz medium: improvisation in a world of fixed boundaries, artificial boundaries, but boundaries non-the-less. Form and function, urban conjunction: found objects, schizophrenia: anomie. George Condo's painting for the last several years has been a psychological exploration of the depersonalized: De Chirico doll structures in "Uncanny" light fused with Freud, gestures gifted from muses as seen on t.v., floods of thoughts with no thinker.... Jazz. If all of this has been a kind of nebulous engagement with what art could be and has been, if all this seems like a bifurcation point across racial, social, and economic divisions that seem only to be made of the air that they are spoken on because we do not live them - perhaps it is an oblique interpretation of the paintings and the names they reference. Like Foucault said a while ago: "Ruse and new triumph of madness: the world that thought to measure and justify madness, since in its struggles and agonies it measures itself by the excess of works like those of Nietzsche, of Van Gogh, of Artaud. And nothing in itself, especially not what it can know of madness, assures the world that it is justified by such works of madness. " George's words - another series of quotations:"chord changes to my favorite paintings...""different musicians come and go across the surface""no drips, just drawings""it all kind of formed - don't forget "Monk's Underground""it's kind of like when Duke plays Ellington...."

....call and response, fluid connections in the dramatugical grid, gestures drawn painstakingly across the surface, paper made into functional surface elements of the painting - the semiology is one of involution. Cadavre Exquis: Sign form, sign function. It's what we see on the streets everyday. Each corner, each street sign, each musical note: each and every one a small cue guiding our movement as we move through one invisible field of meaning to another in a world whose surface is a kind of tabula rasa where movement and gesture have seamlessly blended with the realm of ideas. Sound and signification in a dance of motion. Kinedramatic check the vibe as non static: feel the flow. Perhaps this should be kept in mind when viewing the works....Or to paraphrase Nathaniel Mackey...
(cd:dir>invocation/quotation>goto>
...All but overcome by vertigo...raising it too to a mythic height, crossing what appeared to be the space between worlds, he brought the scrap of paper up to where he could read what was written on it, the words "Namesake Epigraph" beneath which was a passage in quotes:when a and b occurred together as parts of the same total object, without being discriminated, the occurrence of one of these, a, in a new combination of ax, favors the discrimination of a, b, and x from one another.Elements are withdrawn from their usual settings and combined with one another in a totally unique configuration, the monster. Monsters startle neophytes into thinking about objects, persons,relationships,and features of their environment they have hitherto taken for granted... "

0 Stuart Hall "What is this 'black' in black popular culture?" 1992
1 Antonin Artaud, "The Theater and It's Double" pp 48, (NY, Grove Press,1958)
2 Ibid, pp. 49
3 Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself, "The White Negro," pp345 1957, (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1992)
4 Aldous Huxley, Heaven and Hell, pp84, (NY, Harpers & Row, 1954)
5 Marshall Mcluhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy
6 Op cit, Mailer, 349
7 Ibid, pp 49
8 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, pp 289, (NY, Vintage, 1965)
9 Italo Calvino, "Six Memos for the Next Millennium: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1985-86, Visibility" pp91 (NY, Vintage/Random House, 1988)
10 Ibid, pp 91
11 Marshall Mcluhan in Playboy, 1969, vol 16 #3 pp56
12 Op cit, Foucault, pp289
13 Nathaniel Mackey, Djbot Baghostus's Run, pp 157-8 (LA, Sun and Moon Press, 1993)
The consequences of mass culture, to him, created the birth cry of our world of cybernetics and distributed networks of identity, our world of Condo painting: "It is that alchemy and the theater are so to speak are virtual arts, and do not carry their end - or their reality - within themselves....where alchemy, through its symbols, is the spiritual Double of an operation which functions only on

text Paul Miller Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid